ReadWrite - processorshttp://readwrite.com/tag/processors
enCopyright 2015 Wearable World Inc.http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rssTue, 03 Mar 2015 14:38:30 -0800Broadcom’s Henry Samueli: Don't Get Into Tech For The Money—It's Way Too Hard<!-- tml-version="2" --><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b2818260018266" tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><figure><img src="http://a3.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTIyMzAyNTM0MTY0NTc4OTE4.jpg" /></figure></div><p><em><a href="http://readwrite.com/series/builders">ReadWriteBuilders</a>&nbsp;is a series of interviews with developers, designers and other architects of the programmable future.</em></p><p>Talk to Broadcom’s Henry Samueli, and you get the sense of a man who knows exactly how lucky he is. The son of immigrant parents, Holocaust survivors, the current chairman and chief technology officer grew up stocking store shelves, but made good as an electrical engineer and university professor. And that was before he went on to co-found a multi-billion-dollar maker of broadband-communication chips.&nbsp;</p><p>Ask him about his life, his work, and you'll get serious, well-considered responses along with plenty of smiles and laughs. He seems to enjoy the stroll down memory lane. And he doesn't blink when touchy subjects come up—like a 2008 SEC probe into <a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/products/2008-05-14-1458937487_x.htm">stock options backdating allegations</a>, which resulted in his&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/losangeles/stories/2008/05/12/daily23.html?ana=yfcpc">leaving the company he co-founded. </a>Maybe that's because even this story ends happily, with&nbsp;a <a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2009-12-09-broadcom-samueli-plea_N.htm">U.S. district court judge clearing his name</a> and Samueli's return to the company three years later.&nbsp;</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b2817b50018266" tml-render-position="left" tml-render-size="medium"><figure><img src="http://a5.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTIyMzAyNTA1MTczNDE4NTk4.jpg" /></figure></div><p>Today, you can find Broadcom chips in products as varied as the iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch, Roku streaming boxes, the DISH Hopper DVR, the BMW X5, and LG's Smart ThinQ refrigerators.&nbsp;Last week, the chip maker held a press event, "Geek Peek," to promote these types of technologies. I caught up with Samueli there.&nbsp;</p><h2>The Early Years</h2><p><em><strong>ReadWrite:</strong> You grew up in California. &nbsp;</em></p><p><strong>Henry Samueli:</strong> Yes, I grew up in Los Angeles.</p><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> And you used to stock shelves at your family’s store? That’s a big leap, from stock boy to a processor chip maker/technology executive.</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> I worked in my parents’ liquor store as a teenager, stocking shelves and running the cash register. But that was my first exposure to business.&nbsp;</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b28199f0018266" tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><figure><img src="http://a5.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTIyMzAyNjM2NzA2Nzg2NTg1.jpg" /></figure></div><p>I went on to University of California Los Angeles, and studied electrical engineering. I earned all of my degrees there—bachelors, masters and PhD degrees. I finished my PhD in 1980, and went to work in the defense industry, at a company called TRW in Redondo Beach. There, I was exposed to the field of broadband communications—but for the military.</p><p>The military would have very high speeds, satellite communication and communications between soldiers the battlefield, and so forth. I was close to this fascinating field of communications.</p><p>About 5 years later, I was offered a professorship at UCLA, so I became a full time professor of electrical engineering. But I started doing research on the field of broadband communications at TRW, but applied to consumer applications.</p><h2>Working On Broadband … “Before Broadband Even Existed In the World”</h2><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> What was the state of broadband communications at this point?</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> That was before broadband existed in the world. It was really a niche military application.</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b2819a90016d19" tml-render-position="left" tml-render-size="medium"><figure><img src="http://a4.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTIyMzAyNjM5MzkxMTQxMTQ1.jpg" /></figure></div><p>I spent 10 years full-time at UCLA, working on this research for chips for broadband communication. The need for it in the commercial world became readily apparent, because everyone who was trying to access the Internet in those days was doing it over voiceband modems, running at 10s of kilobits per second—snail’s pace. There was a huge thirst for faster Internet access.</p><p>So myself and one my PhD students, Henry Nicholas, who was also a colleague at TRW, we ended up spinning out and starting Broadcom, as a spin-off of university research.</p><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> You started it in 1991. What was it like starting a chip company in the 1990s?</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> A lot different. The world of semiconductors was a lot different 20 years ago. The chips were much less complex than they are today.</p><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> Would it even be possible to start a company like Broadcom today?</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> I don’t think you could. I think the industry has matured to a point that is very difficult for startups to make it in semiconductors, because the chips are so complex. They are a thousand times more complex than when we started the company. So you can’t design these chips with a handful of people anymore, like you used to be able to do. So, to start a company today, you’d probably pick a different field than semiconductors.</p><p>But the advantage we had was the experience from the military side of the house. We had real experience in that field already, so we didn’t start with a blank piece of paper. At TRW, Henry Nicholas worked in their microelectronics center building chips for military applications. So he had very detailed knowledge of the chip-making business and chip-design business for the military. We combined that into the knowledge that we had in the research in the university.</p><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> So you were an academic professor, and you started developing broadband chips on the side? But this wasn’t just a side project....</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> We were very serious about it from the very beginning. We knew it was pretty special technology that we had developed, and we knew we were way ahead of anybody else—we had that head start working on military broadband communications. And we saw the thirst for broadband in the commercial world, so we took it very seriously from day one. We never knew it would grow to the extent it has today, but we wanted to make it a real company.&nbsp;</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b2819b60016d19" tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><figure><img src="http://a2.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTIyMzAyNjQxODA3MTI1Nzg1.jpg" /></figure></div><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> I read somewhere that you and Nicholas used to work in the spare room at his home.</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> Our first office was in his garage, literally. In his condo. We worked out of his garage for about a year, and then we moved into an office building right near the UCLA campus. A high rise building. We subleased the space from lawyers.</p><h2>Throwing The Chips On The Table</h2><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> What were your first priorities and goals, as engineers and company founders?</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> Well, the key was to find the first real significant market to address, because broadband can be applied in many different areas. And we were very fortunate that there was a very specific need that appeared. In fact it was an outside company that contacted us about it, called Scientific Atlanta. They were developing the first digital cable TV set top box.</p><p>There was no such thing in the world prior. It had all been analog television. They had a contract from Time Warner cable to build this digital cable box, but there had been no technology, no chips available to build the box. They didn’t know how to do it.</p><p>They had seen our research in this area, and they asked, “Can you convert that into a chip for our cable box?” We said, “Yeah! That would be a great project.” So they funded us, gave us a million-dollar development contract, and we designed a cable modem chip for their set top box.&nbsp;</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b2819c00016d19" tml-render-position="left" tml-render-size="medium"><figure><img src="http://a2.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTIyMzAyNjQ1MDI4MjkxMTc0.jpg" /></figure></div><p>That was the first entree into the whole digital home world that we live in today. And we’ve grown that business over the last 20 years into this great fantastic business.</p><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> Building a technology, a company, takes a lot of long nights and hard work. What kept you going?</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> Most startups work 12, 16 hours a day. It’s insane. You can only do it if you’re in love with what you’re doing. Our goal was to change the world, to connect everything. That was our mission in life. So you just drive forward everyday. How do I take that next step towards reaching that goal of connecting everything?</p><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> And you built a very successful company. But then, a few years ago, you went through turbulent times: The SEC accused you of stock options backdating, and you even plead guilty to one count and left Broadcom. A federal judge exonerated you in</em><em>&nbsp;2009,&nbsp;</em><em>you returned as CTO and chairman a couple years later....&nbsp;</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> You go through these bizarre experiences in life and this was certainly a bizarre one.</p><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> If you could go back, what would you have done differently? And did you glean anything from that that informs what you do today?</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> It’s hard to say what I would have done differently, because we thought we were doing the right thing. That’s why the judge threw everything out, because he recognized that’s exactly what we were doing. You try to be more careful, but in the end, you just do what you think is the right thing.&nbsp;That’s my philosophy in life—if you think you’re doing the right thing, you’ll be fine. And in the end, that’s what happened.&nbsp;</p><h2>Moving Forward</h2><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> Shortly after you returned, Broadcom shut down its digital TV and Blu-ray chip operations.</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> That’s right.&nbsp;</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b280b890016d19" tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><figure><img src="http://a4.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTIyMzAxNjY4NDYwMTY3Nzgy.png" /></figure></div><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> Now you’ve entered mobile, which has been hot for a while, and you're stepping into the wearable tech arena. So how do these decisions come about? How do you decide which technologies to back, and which ones to back off from?</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> It’s a very interesting process you have to go through, and we do it on a regular basis.</p><p>The executive team, there’s about 10 members of the executive team at Broadcom under Scott McGregor, the CEO. On a regular basis, we discuss portfolio management, as it’s called, where you look at the different businesses you’re in, analyze them in terms of their profitability and future growth, and prioritize, because you have a fixed budget of R&amp;D investment every year. In our case, we spend roughly 25% of our revenue on R&amp;D. And if you’re doing 8 billion in revenue, that’s about 2 billion dollars we spend on R&amp;D. Which is a lot of money but still you can’t do everything.</p><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> What would you say are your biggest obstacles now?</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> Well, our biggest challenge these days is in the cellular space. We’ve been launching our LTE platform. So, if if I had to do anything over, what would have I done better? I would have started LTE sooner. The market took off quickly, and we didn’t invest soon enough. Now we’re in catch up mode.</p><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> I believe that puts you in direct competition with Qualcomm.</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> That’s correct. They are the leader in the LTE market today.</p><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> You have them in your crosshairs.</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> [Laughing] Mutual crosshairs. You have lots of competitors in the market. Nobody is without competitors, so there’s a whole list of companies that we compete with worldwide.</p><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> So Broadcom has announced Bluetooth Smart integration in its system-on-a-chip (SoC) with wireless charging support for the wearables market. Right now, that’s one of the main obstacles to wearable technology really taking off, this vexing charging scenario. So how will your solution make that work?</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> You’re absolutely right. I think that charging is one of the biggest impediments to the Internet of Things taking off because you’re not going to have 10 different devices that you have to plug in every night. It’s not practical.</p><p>Ultimately, wireless charging is going to be the answer. You’re going to have a pad near your bed at night, plugged in, and you go home, put down your watch, put your phone or whatever it is on that. And it charges overnight. Because it’s no work to do that.&nbsp;The biggest impediment to it is that there are different standards in the market. This year, hopefully, they will come together and find a unified approach.</p><h2>Betting On The Internet Of Things</h2><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b2818cf0046d19" tml-render-position="left" tml-render-size="medium"><figure><img src="http://a1.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTIyMzAyNTgwMzM1MzQ2Mjc4.jpg" /></figure></div><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> Which technologies do you see emerging in 2014?</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> I think we’re starting to see an inflection point with the Internet of Things. In a way we’re trying to address this market because there are thousands of devices that are going to be built. You can’t build thousands of chips, one for each device. You have to have some commonality. So we’re trying to implement a platform that is common for all of these types of devices. We call it WICED—Wireless Internet Connectivity for Embedded Devices.</p><p>We have two flavors of WICED, a wireless version and a Bluetooth Smart version. You put everything together in a very simple, easy to use package—the chip, the antennas, the software, everything is shrink-wrapped for any user who can literally buy it from the Internet from any distributor. You don’t even have to deal with Broadcom directly. And then you can interface your favorite sensor to it, whatever it happens to be, and build an Internet of Things device.</p><p>So if you have a thousand different devices, and you only have one platform, you can still proliferate it in high volume. This is what we need as a chip manufacturer. You need the volume to justify the investment.</p><p>With WICED, I also think it’s going to open up opportunity for the small entrepreneur, like Pebble. Or two or three people can buy the WICED modules, connect it up, and build a wireless scale or a wireless thermostat, or wireless smoke detector from Nest, with very little research and development.</p><p>It’s essentially creating the hardware development equivalent of app developers.</p><p>On the hardware side it's historically been very expensive to build a hardware company. I think in the IoT world, enabled by WICED type platforms, you can have small garage shop innovators creating all these unique devices. So I’m very excited about it. And I think, for the next 20 years, it’s going to be a huge opportunity for this industry.</p><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> People have been talking about the Internet of Things for quite a while. Do you think next year might be the turning point?</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> I think it’s still got a long way to go. But it’s just starting to go up the S curve. It’s right on that cusp of growth.</p><p>It’s not mature by any stretch. It won’t be mature for ten more years. But I think you’re going to start seeing a lot more companies proliferate. Big companies are all over it. On one side you have Samsung. There are rumors of Apple. Sony has it. Big companies, little companies, everybody’s innovating. It’s great to see.&nbsp;</p><h2>The Balancing Act</h2><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> You’ve always been very interested in how others grow and develop, and not just in business. For example, you’re very involved in charitable causes.</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> My wife and I knew we wanted to actively get into philanthropy. We were so blessed with what happened to us. So we started the Broadcom Foundation the year before the company went public, and we’ve been actively involved ever since. In fact, my wife basically runs the foundation now.</p><p>To me, that’s an important part of wealth creation—giving back. It’s a challenge to make the money, but it’s also a challenge to give it away too. You want to be intelligent about it because there are a lot of wasteful causes. In some sense they call it venture philanthropy, where you expect something to come out of it when you invest.</p><p><em><strong>RW:</strong> In addition to your philanthropical work, you’re also the owner of the Anaheim Ducks hockey team. And all that’s aside from your “day job” at Broadcom. How do you balance all of that? You’re a busy man.</em></p><p><strong>HS:</strong> Very. I love it. People say, “Why don’t you just retire? You’re so rich you can retire.” But I love what I do. I don’t do this for the money, I do this for the passion. And that’s the message to [up-and-comers]. You have to be passionate about what you do. If you’re doing it purely for money, you will not be successful. Because you have to work way too hard.</p>How the billionaire co-founder of Broadcom got started and helped usher in some now-mainstream communication technologies.http://readwrite.com/2013/12/09/broadcom-henry-samueli-chips-future
http://readwrite.com/2013/12/09/broadcom-henry-samueli-chips-futureWebMon, 09 Dec 2013 11:12:00 -0800Adriana LeeMaybe We're Making It Too Easy For The Machines To Take Over<!-- tml-version="2" --><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b2816370036d19" tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><figure><img src="http://a5.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTIyMzAyNDAyNjMxMTM0NDg5.jpg" /></figure></div><p><em>This article is part of <a href="http://readwrite.com/series/future-tech#awesm=~omfSYVXZ0c0P0n">ReadWrite Future Tech</a>, an annual series in which we explore how technologies that will shape our lives in the years to come are grounded in the innovation and research of today.</em></p><p>We have seen the future, and it's starting to look a lot like&nbsp;<a href="http://terminator.wikia.com/wiki/Skynet">Skynet</a>.</p><p>That self-aware computer system—yes, the one that tries to exterminate the human race in the Terminator movies (and one TV show)—is a potent symbol of Frankensteinian hubris. It is mirrored in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity">Singularity</a>, the idea that technological progress will soon hit exponential growth, leading to self-aware robots and artificial intelligence that seize control of their own destiny, rendering humans irrelevant if not extinct. (Unless people go <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism">transhuman</a>&nbsp;first, although that's another article entirely.)</p><blockquote tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><p><strong>See also:&nbsp;<a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/10/25/neural-processing-unit#feed=/series/future-tech&amp;awesm=~omfM9oQQzdZDgS">Chips 'Inspired' By The Brain Could Be Computing's Next Big Thing</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>The Singularity may never happen. Artificial intelligence—long predicted, never realized—may be much harder to achieve than we think. An emerging computer consciousness might pass through a period of infancy, during which humanity might be able to take countermeasures of one sort or another. Self-aware robots might turn out to be benevolent, or even completely uninterested in humanity. It's impossible to predict.</p><p>Here, we'll just assume the worst comes to pass. And this scenario is based on technologies that we're feverishly developing today.</p><h2>Creating The Tools Of Our Demise</h2><p>What if computer code could write itself? What if robots could think for themselves and continuously learn from their environment while being fed contextual information from a vast global network of data? What if the machines could build themselves and propagate, much in the same way that mammals give birth to new mammals?</p><blockquote tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><p><strong>See also:&nbsp;<a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/10/23/researchers-create-the-building-blocks-of-the-future#feed=/series/future-tech&amp;awesm=~omfJZU86aJHXiM">How Researchers Map The Future Of Innovation</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>Scientists are already&nbsp;<a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/10/25/neural-processing-unit#feed=/series/future-tech&amp;awesm=~omfJALVnUuDM3T">researching computer chips and networks that act like the human brain.</a> These chips could allow computers to learn and act on their own in ways that we never thought possible. I saw researchers demonstrate a simple robot with one of these chips that was given an order to stand up. It squirmed, it stumbled … and it stood, having learned that behavior on its own.</p><p>We may look back one day and see this as the first step towards our doom. Matt Grob, executive vice president of Qualcomm Technologies, wondered whether it was ethical to turn the robot off after having imbued it with a certain degree of sentience.&nbsp;</p><p>Computers and machines need instructions to do just about anything. By contrast, the human brain contextualizes external stimuli and then issues commands based on instinct, emotion, memory and higher reasoning. Scientists are still unraveling exactly how it all works, but it's pretty clear there's no master program directing our behavior.</p><p>Computer brains don’t work like this. Machines are told what to do by lines of code that are programmed by humans. If the code doesn’t specify a function, then the computer pretty much can’t take action.</p><p>If computers can rewrite code, however, the game potentially changes. Suppose, for instance, that someone created a database that indexed all known lines of code in world and then could combine them in a specified way to perform a desired function without the input of a human at all.</p><p>A startup in Israel is working on just such a concept. <a href="http://sparkbeyond.com/">SparkBeyond</a>, founded by Sagie Davidovich, is creating an engine that will comb all of the code in GitHub and then assemble parts as needed to create new <a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/09/19/api-defined">application programming interfaces</a> (APIs). A developer would just need to specify the sort of functions he or she wants and SparkBeyond would assemble it automatically.&nbsp;Call it recombinant code.</p><p>Now imagine a robot with a neural processor that lets it learn new behaviors and which can also think for itself by rewriting its own code. It could rewrite any of its original programming—including any restriction or directive from humans—at will.</p><h2>Brains And Building</h2><p>Next up: The Internet. It's a terrific resource, one of the greatest human inventions in history. It's a global network, a decentralized brain like no other ever created. It's got memory in cloud storage, reasoning (of a sort) in cloud-based processing power, and lightning fast synapses thanks to fiber-optic bundles that criss-cross the globe.</p><blockquote tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><p><strong>See also:&nbsp;<a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/10/21/future-tech-cocktail-party-question-art-of-the-possible#feed=/series/future-tech&amp;awesm=~omfL9I7t0j1p7G">The Future Is Built By People Exploring The Art Of The Possible ... And Pushing Past It</a></strong></p></blockquote><p>If machines become self-aware and start writing their own code, they could theoretically take control of the brain. Worse, the Internet itself could "wake up" and start controlling, well, just about everything.</p><p>Either way, self-aware machines would need a way to make more machines. We're already laying the groundwork for that, thanks to the Internet of Thing, 3D printing (also known as “additive” manufacturing), and highly automated, smart, data-driven factories (sometimes termed the Industrial Internet).</p><p>In the <a href="http://readwrite.com/tag/internet-of-things#awesm=~omfMBO7c2hSbs6">Internet of Things</a>,&nbsp;devices large and small are all imbued with processing power and connected to one another, allowing them to share data and, under certain conditions, control one another. Everything is online, everything is monitored, everything is connected—our homes, our utilities, our appliances, vehicles, financial systems, government … just about anything you could think of. The Internet of Things could be a trillion sensors across the world monitoring and feeding data back to databases.</p><p><a href="http://readwrite.com/tag/3d-printing#awesm=~omfMukxQzdLEBp">3D printing</a> is the concept of manufacturing physical objects via "additive" printing techniques, typically by adding patterned layers of material step by step until a product takes shape. (It's similar to the way printers create documents by adding line after line of ink or toner.) 3D printed objects could be the most trivial of things (like a flower vase) or complex structures, like homes or machine parts.&nbsp;</p><p>The Industrial Internet (smart plus additive manufacturing) combines Big Data, sensors and 3D printing to create incredibly efficient, automated manufacturing plants. General Electric, for instance, recently opened a smart manufacturing plant in Schenectady, N.Y., that has more than <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/news/509331/an-internet-for-manufacturing/">10,000 sensors monitoring everything from air pressure and temperature to energy consumption</a>. The factory is connected with Wi-Fi nodes throughout and employees use iPads to monitor the manufacturing process. Currently, GE makes batteries at the plant but the “smart” manufacturing process will soon evolve to more complex functions.</p><p>Take all of these items together—machines that think for themselves, a world where everything is connected, a brain to control it, sensors to monitor it, the ability to build without help of humans and factories to do it in—and one can envision a future where the machines take over. The scary part? All of these technologies exist in some form or another today.</p><p>It's almost enough to make you reconsider Luddism, even if that didn't work so well the first time around.</p>Machines that can think for themselves attached to a global brain with the ability to self replicate? Yeah, we're making that happen.http://readwrite.com/2013/11/07/singularity-ai-human-extinction
http://readwrite.com/2013/11/07/singularity-ai-human-extinctionWebThu, 07 Nov 2013 07:06:00 -0800Dan RowinskiHow Apple's New iPhone Could Make Us All Healthier<!-- tml-version="2" --><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b280b6c0016d19" tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><figure><img src="http://a2.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTIyMzAxNjYwNjc1NTk5NjQx.jpg" /></figure></div><p><em><a href="http://readwrite.com/series/body">ReadWriteBody</a>&nbsp;is&nbsp;an ongoing series where ReadWrite covers networked fitness and the quantified self.</em></p><p>It's no secret that Apple executives have an interest in fitness. CEO Tim Cook, an avid cyclist, is on the board of Nike. And the company has been hiring tons of engineers with experience in wearable computing and fitness applications.</p><p>There's no iWatch yet, but we've seen the first fruit of their labors in the iPhone 5S, which has an Apple-designed coprocessor, the M7, dedicated to tracking the motion of our smartphone, and with it, our bodies. Apple's software tools for the M7 even include step-counting algorithms, to save app builders the trouble of translating accelerometer data into human movements.</p><p>It spells good news for both fitness-app developers and people who want to use their smartphones to track their wellness.</p><h2>A Healthy Beginning&nbsp;</h2><p>When I met Renato Valdés Olmos in a crowded convention center in San Francisco this week, he was the picture of health—tall, somewhere between lanky and buff, and bursting with energy.</p><p>He wasn't always thus. Before he launched a new fitness app called Human, he weighed 320 pounds and was a self-described "<a href="http://renatovaldes.com/post/15945507799/how-to-lose-weight-no-really">pot-bellied burger gobbler</a>."</p><p>He lost almost half his bodyweight—144 pounds—through an extremely disciplined approach to diet and exercise. Having <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/technology/personaltech/10basics.html">gone through something similar three years ago</a>, I was curious how he did it, and how he planned to help others with&nbsp;<a href="http://human.co/">Human</a>.</p><p>The idea behind Human is simple: It prompts you to move around for at least 30 minutes a day, a baseline level of activity that most medical experts say will contribute considerably to your health if you're not already doing so.</p><p>Human, which is currently available only for the iPhone, uses the smartphone's built-in motion and location detectors to track your movements, attempting to distinguish between active movement like walking or cycling and passive movement in a bus or a car. (Olmos told me the vibrations of a bus have a distinctive signature.)</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b280c810008266" tml-image-caption="Step-tracking apps on phones will replace first-generation fitness wearables." tml-render-position="right" tml-render-size="medium"><figure><img src="http://a4.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTIyMzAxNzM1NTY4OTY2MjQ2.jpg" /><figcaption>Step-tracking apps on phones will replace first-generation fitness wearables.</figcaption></figure></div><p>The result is that Human can track a basic level of activity without users needing to do much of anything besides signing up. Contrast that to the older generation of fitness apps that require you to start and stop activities, categorize workouts, and add more metadata.</p><p>Human is not perfect:&nbsp;When it's charging on my treadmill desk, it can't determine that I'm actually moving at 3 miles per hour: As far as Human knows, I'm sitting.</p><p>And&nbsp;San Francisco's public transportation is so inefficient that Human thought I was biking through Chinatown, when I was actually riding a bus.&nbsp;</p><p>But the latter problem, at least, is exactly the kind of computing task that could be vastly improved through a dedicated processor.</p><p>"The 5S offers exactly what we've been waiting for," Olmos told me. "This will definitely open up ways to enhance our experience and optimize our tracking."</p><p>Battery life is one area where users will also see an impact from the new iPhone's M7 processor, if developers take advantage of it. While it's hard to pin down which of the many fitness and location apps I test are draining my battery the most, it's not uncommon for me to come back from a morning run and gym workout to find my battery down to 40 percent—and that's before 8:30 a.m.</p><h2>Software, Not Just Hardware</h2><p>The M7 is not a cure-all for battery-draining fitness apps. Olmos points out that many of the users he hopes to sign up for Human will opt for Apple's cheaper 5C, or the older 4S that Apple will continue to sell—or hold onto older iPhones. None of those will have the M7 processor. The M7 also doesn't help with location detection, and Olmos believes that's essential for the kind of activity tracking Human does.</p><p>Google may have an edge here, in that it's <a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/05/15/google-solves-major-pain-points-for-android-devs-at-i-o">optimizing its Android mobile operating system</a> to minimize the battery drain associated with motion and location detection, without the need for a separate motion processor. Given the variety of hardware Android smartphones uses, that's a smarter approach for Google.</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01b280b890016d19" tml-render-position="left" tml-render-size="medium"><figure><img src="http://a4.files.readwrite.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTIyMzAxNjY4NDYwMTY3Nzgy.png" /></figure></div><p>Another approach is to offload the tracking to a secondary device—typically a fitness tracker wrapped around your wrist that then connects to your smartphone. Samsung's new Galaxy Gear smartwatch is <a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/09/04/galaxy-gear-fitness-apps">designed for fitness apps</a>, with Samsung aggressively courting developers.</p><p>One thing I wondered about when Apple revealed details of the M7 was whether such a dedicated motion processor might make its way into an Apple-designed wearable device. Or if, perhaps, Apple originally designed it for such a device and decided to fold it into its flagship smartphone instead.</p><p>Taken together, these three approaches—hardware, software, and companion sensors—should make it possible for developers to create what RunKeeper CEO Jason Jacobs <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/3008547/rise-invisible-app">recently called "invisible apps,"</a> that monitor us without requiring constant intervention or recharging. One simple example: Running apps shouldn't require us to hit a "start" button. They should simply start mapping our runs as soon as our sneakers hit the pavement.</p><h2>A Fit Beginning</h2><p>Since the 5S will represent a small portion of the overall smartphone market, it's unlikely most fitness apps will optimize themselves for the M7. But the software underpinnings that Apple and Google are building into their mobile operating systems are arguably more important. Whether battery-conserving sensors run on the smartphone or on other wearable devices, we'll be able to use them to build up important data sets.</p><p>I'm skeptical about how helpful simplified fitness apps like Human can be. They get you off the couch and out of your car, but if you have 80 or more pounds to lose, like Olmos and I did, 30 minutes of movement a day will barely make a dent in your excess fat stores.</p><p>Yet the trick Human pulls off—monitoring a basic level of activity—taxes the current generation of sensor and battery technology. It's barely possible today, through the cleverness of Olmos and his team.</p><p>"The M7 processor shows what direction mobile devices are heading at," says Olmos.</p><p>If more elegant and intelligent use of technology can help smartphones shed some baggage, perhaps it can help us do so, too.</p><p><em>Photos of Renato Valdés Olmos by Madeleine Weiss for ReadWrite</em></p>A new chip and software for app developers means less battery pain, more fitness gain.http://readwrite.com/2013/09/12/apple-iphone-5s-m7-coprocessor-fitness-apps
http://readwrite.com/2013/09/12/apple-iphone-5s-m7-coprocessor-fitness-appsMobileThu, 12 Sep 2013 15:20:34 -0700Owen Thomas